Zoltan Barany

Senior Associate (Non-resident), Burke Chair in Strategy

Zoltan Barany is the Frank C. Erwin Jr. Centennial Professor of Government at the University of Texas, where he has taught since 1991. Throughout his career, his research and writing have concentrated on military politics, military sociology, and democratization globally. His current work focuses on Arab armies (especially in the Gulf) and on the transition from military dictatorship to democracy in Burma/Myanmar. He is the author ofHow Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why (Princeton, 2016);The Soldier and the Changing State: Building Democratic Armies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas (Princeton, 2012);Democratic Breakdown and the Decline of the Russian Military (Princeton, 2007); The Future of NATO Expansion (Cambridge, 2003);The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics (Cambridge, 2001); and Soldiers and Politics in Eastern Europe, 1945-90 (Macmillan, 1993). He is also the coeditor of five other books and has authored dozens of articles in academic and policy journals.

During the final years of the Cold War, Barany worked for the U.S. Army in Europe, CBC Radio Canada International in Ottawa, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich, West Germany. He has been a National Fellow and the Susan Louise Dyer Peace Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and has held visiting appointments at the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, and at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Carleton University (1986) and earned his Ph.D. in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia (1991) where he was a President's Fellow and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York) and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London).